Find relief from anxiety with NPR's series on coping skills: Shots

Stress is part of the human experience.

The older I get, the more I expect challenges and difficulties—in relationships, career, and parenting—as well as health fears. Added to this is the fear of the big things that are beyond our control, from climate change to the ugliness of political polarization and global conflict. It can be anything a lot.

But how we deal with stress is the key to success.

It turns out that there are some simple strategies that can help reduce anxiety and increase positive feelings. And there is plenty of scientific evidence that they work.

You can think of these strategies as skills that you can practice and improve. And that can help you cope better with challenging times.

If you want to strengthen your resistance muscles, sign up NPR's Less stress Newsletter series. Over five weeks, we'll introduce you to these powerful tools and strategies that are proven to help reduce anxiety and increase well-being.

You'll learn skills such as positive reappraisal, mindfulness and self-compassion, as well as insights into the science of stress from leading experts in psychology and neuroscience.

Less Stress: A Quest to Regain Your Calm opens September 30th. If you are facing stressful situations, big or small, join us! How to log in.

A special opportunity: take a resilience masterclass

NPR is partnering with Northwestern University to bring our audience an online stress reduction course and research study.

Less stress draws on the work of Judith Moskowitz, a research psychologist at Northwestern's Feinberg School of Medicine, who created the course. It teaches eight skills to strengthen positive feelings.

It is based on her more than 20 years of research on people who have experienced very difficult situations, including women with stage four breast cancer and people caring for a loved one with Alzheimer's. Their peer-reviewed studies point to benefits.

Their research shows that people who learn and practice these skills report feeling more joy and less anxiety, even in difficult times.

“We've really built up a pretty large body of research showing that these skills can be useful for anyone, regardless of the type of stress they're experiencing,” Moskowitz says.

When you sign up, you'll take part in an online research study led by Dr. Moskowitz part. You will complete surveys to assess your own levels of anxiety and positive emotions before and after the course. The course is available to you free of charge.

Learning these skills takes practice – typically people spend about 10 to 15 minutes each week learning the skills and a few minutes a day practicing them.

Take part in the search!

Click here to register Take Northwestern's online resilience course and participate in their research study. Please note: Due to the high level of interest, there may be delays in registration.

Click here to join NPR's Less stress, a five-week newsletter series, Bring science-backed stress management tools to your inbox.

The Stress Less series is edited by Jane Greenhalgh and Carmel Wroth.